Feb. 16, 2006 • Volume 14 Number 11

Retired English Professor Anne Ferry Dies

A funeral Mass was said on Feb. 7 at the Church of the Advent in Boston for literary critic Prof. Emeritus Anne Ferry (English), who died Feb. 2 at age 75 after a long illness.

A native of New York, Prof. Ferry joined the BC faculty in 1966 and taught until her retirement in 1991. In addition to teaching classes in poetry and literary criticism, Prof. Ferry helped develop the English Department's doctoral program.

Colleagues and former students recalled her passion for teaching. Interviewed by the Boston Globe, Prof. Rosemarie Bodenheimer (English) - a student of Prof. Ferry at Harvard, where she taught from 1958-66 - called her "the most influential teacher I ever had...I remember her patience in letting her students figure out for themselves how to talk about poetry."

Prof. Ferry also earned acclaim for her writing on English and American poetry. She published seven books, including All in War with Time, Tradition and the Individual Poem and The Title to the Poem, which received the Christian Gauss Award of the Phi Beta Kappa Association.

The Harvard Review called Tradition and the Individual Poem "a masterful combination of literary criticism and historical scholarship," while Modern Language Quarterly said Ferry's "careful research yields rich materials for further study."

Prof. Ferry was a Guggenheim fellow and a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.

She leaves her husband, poet and translator David Ferry, the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus at Wellesley College; her daughter, Brandeis University Assistant Professor of Anthropology Elizabeth Emma Ferry; her son, photojournalist Stephen Ferry of New York; and two grandchildren.